Quotes from Michael Lewis

Amos was not merely an optimist; Amos willed himself to be optimistic, because he had decided pessimism was stupid. When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos liked to say. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.

Athens somehow manages to be bright white and grubby at the same time. The most beautiful freshly painted neoclassical homes are defaced with new graffiti. Ancient ruins are everywhere, of course, but seem to have little to do with anything else. It's Los Angeles with a past.

It wasn't hard to imagine why this might be—a heightened sensitivity to pain was helpful to survival. "Happy species endowed with infinite appreciation of pleasures and low sensitivity to pain would probably not survive the evolutionary battle," they wrote.

The U.S. stock market now trades inside black boxes, in heavily guarded buildings in New Jersey and Chicago. What goes on inside those black boxes is hard to say—the ticker tape that runs across the bottom of cable TV screens captures only the tiniest fraction of what occurs in the stock markets. The public reports of what happens inside the black boxes are fuzzy and unreliable—even an expert cannot say what exactly happens inside them, or when it happens, or why.

read everything he could find on the subject. One of his favorite books was actually called Complexity, by M. Mitchell Waldrop. His favorite paper to pass out was "How Complex Systems Fail," an eighteen-bullet-point summary by Richard I. Cook, now a professor of health care systems safety in Sweden. (Bullet

In the interest of clarity, they'd hoped to preserve the full name, but they discovered a problem doing so when they set out to create an Internet address: investorsexchange.com.

It was not that he lacked values, but he had a keen sense that at times the ends justified the means, and an equally keen sense of his own interests. There

Did I think I was doing God's work?" he said later. "No. But I did think market efficiency was something important for the economy.

Toda profesión estaba organizada para confirmar la sabiduría de sus decisiones

All of a sudden the market is all about algos and routers. It's hard to figure this stuff out.

I figured out that managers do all this shit because it is safe," said Alderson. "They don't get criticized for it.

The exercise was meant to illustrate the powerful instinct people have for finding causes for any effect, and also for creating narratives. "The

Amos thought people paid an enormous price to avoid mild embarrassment," said his friend Avishai Margalit, "and he himself decided very early on it was not worth it.

how can a man who doesn't speak English lie

Silicon Valley is to the United States what the United States is to the rest of the world.

It's one person coming in from China, and we have it under control," said President Trump. "It's going to be just fine.

For people to learn, they need to want to learn.

would never again let the market dictate the direction of his life.

The only inexplicable aspect of the process was that economic theory (which is, after all, what economics students were supposed to know) served almost no function in an investment bank. The bankers used economics as a sort of standardized test of general intelligence.

She spoke seven languages, including Mandarin and Polish, and was finishing up her master's in Intercultural Misunderstanding, which just has to be Europe's next growth industry.

When your daughter is late and you worry, it fills your mind even when you know there is very little to fear." You'd pay more than you should to rid yourself of that worry.

I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.

identity as Citizen has been replaced by Consumer. The idea that government should serve the citizens like a waiter or concierge, rather than in a 'collective good' sense.

The person who makes his living searching for the new new thing is not like most people, however. He does not seriously want to sink back into any chair. He needs to keep on groping. He chooses to live perpetually with that sweet tingling discomfort of not quite knowing what it is he wants to